A portion of Verizon's network crumpled on Wednesday, with up to 175,000 customers seeing "SOS" in their phones' status bars instead of connection bars.

Many Verizon customers are experiencing a major outage on Wednesday, disrupting calling and cellular services across the U.S.

Downdetector, a website that tracks user-submitted reports of outages among popular online services, told CNN over email that more than 1 million issue reports related to the outage have been generate...